He seemed to understand without one word from her that she wanted him to drive her out of town. First he had to drive her through it. The town was small and it quickly dwindled to lone campers surrounded by junk cars and cast-off appliances. Then it was the two of them, their car, wind-ruffled prairie.
Between them on the seat, tucked into the space between cushions, the bag remained where he had left it, except it was no longer folded over. She wanted him to know that she’d read it, but she would not mention it. But they could take a ride together before he left town. She understood that he was running from something and she understood that he had found her tiny town adequate cover from whatever or whoever it was he was fleeing. He understood things about her, too. Otherwise how would he have known to drive them out of town into the open emptiness she craved?
When, a half mile from town, the speed limit rose to seventy-five and Marcus only gradually accelerated, she decided he was driving slowly in deference to her mood. Certainly it was obvious, her mood. Transparent as a teenager in full-blown mope. Maria felt seventeen. She felt like she had on those evenings when Randy had made them late, yammering with her father on the subject of automobiles, and when she had finally gotten the two of them separated she had punished Randy with silence. Now, ten years later, she was riding in a car with another boy, not talking. No, it was not the same. She had only to look over at the driver to feel the difference, or consider the car itself. A Buick instead of a Nova. Light blue instead of the burnt orange that led Randy to nickname it Flamethrower. Not nearly so loud as the Nova, which was so loud you could not hear the radio, a loud that sounded sick to her, like the car was going to blow up, though Randy claimed it was only the sound of badassedness. The Buick was clean but it was not so clean that if you touched the dash you’d leave a thumbprint on the Armor All’d vinyl. The Buick rode low and absorbed the bumps of the backroads, while the Nova was high and bouncy. The Buick smelled kind of bad instead of fake citrus scented.
And the boy was not a boy. He was boyish in appearance, despite the fact that his torso showed the accumulated weight of middle age and within a year or so scalp would show beneath the thin, graying hair that he would comb over his forehead. Though he was perhaps not the most mature person—he tended to lose things, farms, trucks, more than likely women—he was definitely not a boy. A boy would be so threatened by her silence that he would assume she was mad at him, assume her every thought was about him. The man beside her did not say, What’s wrong? or, thank God, Do you want to talk about it? He could see she was upset and so he drove.
It felt wrong comparing riding in a car now to riding in a car so long ago with the boy. After all, it was the boy who, when she and the man test-drove the car, had seen something in the man that she could trust. Not yet given up on the getting back, the boy had said about the man, as if he knew that this would be a good fit for her, knew somehow that the man, too, had suffered some loss but was determined to move beyond the emptiness that follows you around for years if you let it. Preferring the ride with the man to the ride with the boy would be the worst sort of betrayal, since it was the boy who had vetted her union with this man; it had been the boy’s hand atop her own that scratched the pen across the forms she’d signed in Bobby Kepler’s office. Maria could not now say she preferred to ride with the boy instead of the man, for hadn’t she hurt the boy enough when he was alive to keep on hurting him years after his death?
And now she had hurt her mother, too. The night before, after her mother had been so buckled by Maria’s confession that she had sat down at the table, and after her mother had kept saying, “I just did not see it, I just didn’t, I ought to have, I ought to,” and Maria said finally, “See what, Mom, know what?” her mother did not answer. She did not even look up from the place mat, so plastic and so green, such a silly thing to stare at in order to demonstrate your indifference to someone who was just trying to be honest with you. So Maria had done what she had always done when her mother would not give her what she needed, which was so simple, only words—it did not really even matter which words. Maria just needed sentences sent her way so that she might send a sentence back until they had not so much reached an understanding as constructed, from their back-and-forth, some attempt at an understanding, something aside from her mother shutting down and Maria doing what she had always done, what she had done the night before: gone to bed.
But not to sleep. Even after all her years away, she had come quickly to relearn the train schedule and she heard and kept time by their passage until 4:00 a.m., alternately sorry and angry: sorry for not knowing how to communicate her needs to her mother, angry at her mother for acting as if, by buying a car with Marcus, Maria had committed some deep breach of loyalty, when her mother for years had carried on openly with Ray, driving her father from job to job and finally, humiliated, into idleness if not illness.
Guilt, anger, trains. Finally a few hours of sleep. She heard her mother get up and she heard her in the bathroom and then in the kitchen. Heard the coffee brewing, smelled it. She remembered lying in bed on those mornings so long ago and hearing her father’s boots on the floor, his cough, the lower and longer cough of his truck in the drive as it stuttered to life. Her mother’s movements were softer and she could tell she was trying to be quiet, and because Maria was angry and guilty and had lain awake telling time by the train whistle, she decided that there was something in the manner of her mother’s quiet, the way she tiptoed around and opened and closed doors and cabinets with such care, that was slightly resentful; she decided that her mother was annoyed that she could not turn on talk radio or, for all Maria knew of her mother’s life, belt out “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton, the only song Maria had ever heard her mother sort of halfway sing along to, off the only album her mother had ever owned, to Maria’s knowledge.
The door sucked shut, followed by the whine of the Cherokee in reverse as her mother backed it down the drive. Maria was halfway through her cup of coffee when she discovered the note. It was on the same place mat her mother had spent so long studying the night before. Same ancient stationery—the floral-bordered stock her mother had written her on all those years ago—and the same careful penmanship.
Dear Maria,
I have been thinking and I am not so sure this restaurant idea is a good idea. I just do not think the type food you are wanting to fix would go here. I believe if I am going to put something in that space well I have to think first of the motel. Whatever goes in that space, would it have an effect on business? That is what I will have to keep in mind. As you know that motel is the only thing I have got to live on, your daddy did not have any pension, he had not worked in years. So I have been thinking about it and I believe you ought to think what else you might do while you are here if you decide to stay.
She signed it “Your mother.” No “With love” in quotation marks this time for Maria to interpret as her mother’s misunderstood notion that quotation marks embodied emphasis.
Maria left the note where she found it. She went to her room and got her suitcase out of the closet and stuffed it with clothes and she went into the bathroom and grabbed her toothbrush and her lotions and her hairbrush and she fetched her jacket and her car keys. It was 7:40. If she hurried she could be at the Dairy Queen when Marcus dropped the car off. She wanted Marcus to drive her out of town and let her look at things. Maybe they would happen upon a pack of javelinas, or see, racing alongside the car, pacing it, a pronghorn antelope, or glimpse, across far grasslands rippling in wind, the silver glint of a train on its run to El Paso. She could not remember ever having desired so totally a man she was not sleeping with. In their previous conversations they had asked each other many questions and the answers were not the sort that raised more questions. Instead they were words that filled in blanks, as if on a test. They were the right answers only in that they took up space where once was a gap. What she desired now was for his presence to fill a blank.
And then she arrived at the D
airy Queen to find him gone already, the car backed into a space near the drive-through. Inside she found another rejection letter, her second in as many hours. Written on a Dairy Queen bag, but a dirty one. She stared at it a long time—his jerky handwriting, the stain she realized was ketchup, the words crossed out as if he was the sort who writes before he thinks and then thinks better of what he has written—before she read it.
Now, in the car with Marcus, Maria studied the red-rock cliffs outside her window for hawks, or a cave, something to distract her from the thing that had led her to pull over to the curb on Pecos Street, slide over when she found him, and ask him without words to drive her out of town into open air. She hoped being in Her Lowness with Marcus would keep her from thinking about her mother’s note. Did she want Maria to pack up and leave? Was that what the note was trying to tell her? If you decide to stay. Sweet Jesus, it’s only a car. Her mother knew that Maria cared more about her jeans than she did a car. Even had the man taken off with the car, it was only, to her, a thousand-dollar car.
And yet Maria knew, too, that it was far more than a car. When she was living in San Luis Obispo, she had gotten into a spat with a lover over whether to dine alfresco. The night was busy with flies and she got tired of shooing them from her salmon and he did not want to go inside—“I like fresh air,” he kept saying, as if Maria did not—and the next day they had broken up. But not over flies. Like the car, the flies were singled out. Upon their fragile wings were heaped months of suppressed infractions.
Maybe her mother really was worried about her running the restaurant and the effect it might have on her occupancy rate. And she was so thrilled at first to have her daughter home that she had said yes despite her misgivings about the menu, but then Maria went out and bought a car with a perfect stranger, and her mother saw something in her daughter that she assumed had been beaten out of her by years of surviving on her own, no family, no support—for this is how her mother got over things, by working herself to the bone—or maybe she thought this thing in Maria that she ought to have seen would have been leached out of her by the unyielding accretion of time. But obviously it had not. It was still there, whatever it was that her mother saw, and its presence made her mother want Maria to go back where she had come from and all because of a car.
“I wonder if you will do me a favor,” she said after twenty-three minutes of silence.
“Sure,” he said, and she knew he would not ask what the favor was or say, as so many men would have, Depends on what it is.
“I want you to keep the car.”
“So you read my letter?”
“You mean your bag? Yes, I read it. And I appreciate your offer, but you know I could never do that.”
“I don’t want the car.”
“How are you planning on getting to Mexico?”
“They have buses that cross over all the time.”
“You used to like the car.” He had liked it enough to claim it out from under her, after she asked him to take it for a test-drive. He had liked it enough to pretend he was not interested in it, which meant he had liked it enough to lie. He desired it so much that he was willing to split it with her. Maybe that was all that drove him to share it in the first place: he had to have it at any cost. Maybe her notion that he, too, was hiding something was wrong. Just another man who loved another car.
“So did you.”
“I still like it,” she said. And it was true; she liked it as much as it was possible to like something you knew nothing about. “It’s just that I don’t need it now.”
“Why not? I thought you were starting your restaurant.”
“My mother’s buying a truck and giving me her Jeep,” she lied. She wasn’t ready to say she was leaving to herself, much less to Marcus.
“Oh. Well, it’s none of my business, but how come—”
“Her timing’s never been all that great. So you’re going to take a bus across the border, but how are you going to get around once you’re there?”
“My friend has a car. I’ll buy a bike. It’s not that big, the place I’m headed. Apparently you can walk everywhere. I’ll get a job on a farm within walking distance of the village.”
“A white guy working the fields in Mexico?”
“Maybe they have affirmative action.”
“Have you ever been to Mexico?”
“In fact, I have,” he said. “To the Yucatán. My ex-girlfriend ate a salad the first night we were there and she got so sick she was in bed for the next three days, and I went off to see the ruins but I felt so guilty for leaving Rebecca that I confess I did not enjoy myself.”
“Typical Mexican vacation narrative. You were staying in Cancún?”
“Playa Del Carmen. Same difference, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to either of those places. Mainly I know Chihuahua. Or knew. My father had cousins in Ojinaga. He didn’t cross over much because he was Tejano—his people were living in Texas before there was a Texas. He said people treated him differently even just across the border in Ojinaga. Still, because my father is Mexican and because I grew up so close to Mexico, I know a little about it. One thing I know is that they have not heard of affirmative action. They have no need for it, because the white people who go there are either retired or run the maquiladoras.”
Marcus was silent. Before, she had craved his silence, but now she wanted him to talk to her. Had she said something to upset him?
“I kind of got the feeling you liked it here,” she said.
“Oh, I do. I really like it. I like Texas, what I’ve seen of it.”
“What have you seen of it?”
“Just what you see from I-10.”
“Like Houston? San Antonio?”
“I didn’t see much. I mean, I didn’t stop. The interstate loops around them. All I saw were warehouses and apartment complexes.”
“What would you like to see in Texas?”
“I don’t know. The Hill Country? The Alamo?”
“The Alamo would disappoint you. It’s tiny. And crowded. Not to mention a lie.”
“How is it a lie?”
“Well, I would say that the view of history you learn there is definitely skewed.”
“That’s not surprising. History is always skewed. I can’t be disappointed by something I expect. Plus, hagiography is the modus operandi of shrines. I know this because I built a shrine myself. It wasn’t like I was going to emphasize the negative qualities of carnivorous plants in the exhibits.”
“What are the negative qualities?”
“One could argue that they’re cold-blooded killers,” he said. “Sitting around with jaws open waiting for unsuspecting insects to light on them and then eating them for lunch.”
“That’s what’s cool about it, though, right?”
“It is what’s unique about it,” Marcus said, in a way that made her feel foolish for using the word “cool.”
“There’s nothing unique about the Alamo. But if that’s what you want to see, you should see it before you leave Texas. You should see Texas before you leave Texas.”
“I guess you’re right. I wasn’t really in the position to stop a lot on my way down.”
When he did not elaborate, Maria did not ask him to. She figured he’d talk when he wanted to talk.
“Once I open my place, I’ll be working eighty-hour weeks,” she said. “I haven’t been anywhere in this state for years. Since you’re leaving and you won’t have a car, we could take a short trip. See a little Texas.”
“You mean now?”
“I do mean now. I can drop you off at your hotel and you can get what you need for a few days. That is, if you think the car will make it that far.”
Marcus pushed a button and water sprayed the windshield. Wipers obscured her view of the black line of highway ahead. Though there were, as always in West Texas, bugs crusting the windshield, she decided he was only feigning deliberation. She decided he did not really want to go to Mexico tod
ay, for otherwise he would have said, immediately, No, thank you, I’m headed south instead of east.
“Long as we keep her topped off with oil and don’t run her off-road, we could drive this crate to Alberta and back.”
“This is a hovercraft, not a crate,” said Maria. “And we don’t want to go to Alberta. We want to go to San Antonio.”
Austin, Texas, 1986
Dr. Brock bought the Buick because his father had played golf with the owner of the Buick dealership and Dr. Brock had always worked hard to please his father, who before his death had worked in the physical plant of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. His father had bought Buicks from this man because he had known him all his life. His father was a townie and the Buick dealer was also a townie and for this reason Dr. Brock’s father drove Buicks.
Despite the fact that his family had been in Lawrence for generations, most of them within a square mile of the university, Dr. Brock was the first in his family to attend college. He lived at home and rode his bike the two blocks to the university and he worked summers in the physical plant and saved his money for med school. After a residency in Ann Arbor, Dr. Brock came home and married and bought the first of his Buicks, a LeSabre that, after he and his wife had three children in five years, took on the ragged and vaguely odiferous air of a car used to haul around toddlers. Dr. Brock bought his wife a Volvo and kept the LeSabre for himself until he traded it in for a slightly used Electra.
The Electra was light blue and clean and he was perplexed as to why anyone would want to part with it, seeing as how there were only sixteen thousand miles on the odometer. His father’s friend the car dealer had tried to sell him a new Buick, but Dr. Brock had wandered over to the Electra, as he was drawn to its sky blueness and its general cleanliness. He assumed at first it was brand new. Because Myron Brock, the doctor’s father, had been such a good customer, and because the Buick had been so long on the lot that he had twice reduced the price, the Buick dealer had quickly conceded to selling him the used Electra, though of course he would have preferred to sell him a new vehicle. He told Dr. Brock that the car had come from a dealer in Cleveland who had trouble moving it since that area of the country had suffered much during the recent economic downturn. When Dr. Brock, during the test-drive, asked the dealer why anyone would opt to sell such a car, there must be something wrong with it, the dealer assured him that all his pre-owned vehicles were subject to rigorous examinations. “Just like you’d do on me, Doc,” he added, laughing. “Just think of it this way: all the bugs have been worked out, the car’s broken in good now.”
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